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Posts from February 2006

February 16, 2006

CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION AWARDS 2006 GRANTSNEW YORK, NY (February 8, 2006) – Creative Capital Foundation, the national arts organization that supports individual artists, announces the recipients of its 2006 grants. Sixty-one artists representing 43 projects in the performing arts, emerging fields, and innovative literature received initial awards of $10,000. As the projects develop, the foundation offers additional funds; projects may receive as much as $50,000 each through
the tenure of the multi-year grant and at least $1 million has been committed
to the 43 projects. (Read
more)

Some NEWSgrist pals are among this year's new crop of Creative Captial Grantees:

Emerging FieldsCory Arcangel (Brooklyn, NY) Digital ArtsD.I.Y.W.I.K.I. – An open-source website detailing methods of media intervention and hacking, embodying the ethic of openness and generosity among the closed field of hackers, home hobby programmers and new media artists

Golan Levin (Pittsburgh, PA) Digital ArtsObservation as Interaction: Eye Contact Systems – A series of large-scale artworks from wall projections to robotic sculptures that play with the idea of surveillance by returning the viewer’s gaze using tracking software and a simulated return glance

Jane Marsching (Roslindale, MA) Digital ArtsAbout Here and Later: Data Mining the North Pole – A series of digital images and sculptures, exploring both scientific and myth-based impressions of The North Pole, while detailing the collapse of the area due to environmental changes

Walid Raad, founder of the semi-fictitious Atlas Group, a collective
that archives ephemera from Lebanon's civil war, shares both Borges's
proclivity for elaborate fiction laced with apparent fact and Dante's
rhetoric of exile. Raad transforms his native Lebanon into a kind of
Beatrice, or lost love.

For Raad, Lebanon is a Gordian knot
of notaries, dentists, professors and mechanics -- a principality of
would-be revolutionaries, marginal characters and heartbroken souls.
Instead of the totality of war, Raad fixates on its parts. He lets us
know that there were 3,641 car bombs detonated in Beirut between 1975
and 1991. In seven collages titled Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire,
an invented character named Dr. Fadl Fakhouri presents pictures of cars
and Arabic writing. One image reads, "Silver Volvo; August 20, 1985; 56
killed; 120 injured; 100 kg of TNT; 24 cars burned; 11 buildings
burned." Raad-Fakhouri fetishizes the facts of violence in Beirut the
way Henry Darger recorded the weather in Chicago. Elsewhere, he gives
us the serial numbers of engines that were blown from car bombs, how
far each motor flew and where it landed.

The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, Notebook Volume 38;'Already Been in a Lake of Fire, plates 57 and 58', 1975-2002

In Hostage: The Bachar Tapes,
Raad, 38, recounts what he calls the "captivity narrative" of five
American hostages held in Lebanon in the 1980s, adding a fictitious
Arab who describes nocturnal homoerotic encounters. In Miraculous Beginnings
we see a hallucinogenic 52-second film made by Dr. Fakhouri in which he
exposed a frame every time he thought the war had come to an end. It's
an abstract image of lost hopes and wishful thinking. In I Only Wish That I Could Weep we see furtive views of sunsets filmed by a Lebanese army intelligence officer posted to monitor a boardwalk in Beirut.

Borges
wrote about the "pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition."
Rather than taking pleasure in arcana, Raad's work exudes a mania for
minutiae that turns melancholic and openly joyless. His art is like a
detective report or a communiqué from a secret agent: Facts are
related, occurrences indexed, detachment and delusion mingle with
obsession.

Yet for all his pseudo-scientific esotericism
and his ultra-educated post-structuralism, Raad (or at least his
character) is a textbook romantic: a man in search of the miraculous, a
knight-errant taken with political intrigue, social estrangement and
emptiness -- someone preoccupied with connections and affinities, real
or not. As with all romantics, Raad is homesick. Lebanon for him is a
refuge and nightmare, a utopia and a cult. Raad's vision of his
war-torn country is part apparition, part anxiety attack and part
healing fantasy. You can almost feel the incubus of history squatting
on his chest and reciting Lucian's description of the passage to the
Isle of Dreams: "As we approach, it recedes, and seems to get further
and further off." This is Raad's relationship to Lebanon's civil war. [read on...]

[...] So what is The Atlas Group? This is a surprisingly difficult question
to answer without giving away the project, but a good beginning was
provided by Raad in a talk I attended in 2001. He explained that it is
a foundation established in 1976 by artist Mahia Traboulsi dedicated to
the preservation of rare and unusual artifacts from the Lebanese civil
war. Since there were no archives to speak of in the beginning stages
of the project Traboulsi fabricated relics, and lectured about the
group, until it gradually received enough notoriety that people began
send the foundation their own materials for study and conservation. In
2001 Raad claimed replica's of the original archived were never sent
out for exhibition, for fear that they would be damaged, (though
obviously this is meant to be a clue that they don't exist in the first
place). [SPOILER WARNING AHEAD] In light of this information, it seems
rather obvious that [...]The point that imagined histories, are often indistinguishable from the
real and will effect our understanding of historical events can not be
understated in this work. [emphasis mine; read on...]

Ah, but they are on the web. (Naturally the WP website has buried
Richard's story, the only important visual arts story that's been in
the Post in eons. And they could have found these links in under five
minutes.)

All depictions of Muhammad -- or so we hear daily -- are now and
have always been forbidden in Islam. Art's history disputes this. True,
that strict taboo today is honored now by almost all Muslims, but old
paintings of the prophet -- finely brushed expensive ones, made
carefully and piously by Muslims and for them -- are well known to most
curators of Islamic art.

There are numerous examples in public institutions in Istanbul, Vienna, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, Los Angeles and New York.

Four
are here in Washington in the Smithsonian Institution on the Mall.
Three are in the Freer Gallery of Art. The fourth is next door in the
Freer's sister museum, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

These
portrayals of Muhammad are not big or new or common. Most were made for
the elite. And most were bound in books. These were lavish volumes that
were political in purpose, and were designed to celebrate and dignify
self-promoting rulers. What their paintings show is this: Once upon a
time -- in the era of the caliphs and the sultans and the shahs, when
the faithful felt triumphant, and courtly learning blossomed -- the
prophet did appear in great Islamic art.

Old portrayals
of Muhammad come from Sunni lands and Shia ones, from the Turkey of the
Ottomans, the India of the Mughals, from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Syria
and Iran. The oldest that survive were painted circa 1300. The newest
were produced about 200 years ago.

Three such pictures, from
Turkey, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, are in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"Contrary to widespread
assumptions today," says a statement issued by that museum's Islamic
specialists, "the traditional arts of Islam, whether Sunni or Shiite,
often did reverently depict the prophet, as abundantly attested by
manuscript illuminations ranging in time from the 13th to the 18th
century, and in space from Turkey to Bengal. Pictorial representations
of the prophet remain accepted by many Shiites to this day, although
they have been generally frowned upon by most Sunnis since about the
18th century."

"Of course such depictions exist," says Sayyid
Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America. "What
is important to remember is that they were never widely available. Had
they been, the common people surely would have resented them. But they
were made for powerful dynasties, and no one could take them to task.

"Today the consensus is strong. From Morocco to Indonesia, our tradition prohibits such images."

Those
rough cartoons from Denmark were intended to enrage. They do what they
set out to do. Published in a bunch, they disrespect the faith. The
paintings of the prophet found in grand museums aren't like that at all.

They
were once imperial luxuries. The rulers who commissioned them were
attempting to ally themselves with God-approved, courageous figures of
the past.

The paintings of the prophet were not made for walls. They stayed in costly bindings. Sunlight hasn't dimmed them. [read on...]

The
current group show at SoHo's Pomegranate Gallery is the first American
glimpse of contemporary art from war-torn Iraq. It paints a picture of
a national school in formation, and offers a subtle essay on the many
things that art can mean in dire times.

Pomegranate, which
has only recently opened, claims the distinction of being the first
U.S. space dedicated to contemporary art from the Middle East. The
setup is a little unusual. A large coffee bar occupies the front of the
space, and the gallery is filled with tables where people can chat and
have lunch. Gallery director Oded Halahmy, a sculptor who is an Iraqi
Jew by birth, says he wanted an atmosphere that recreates the social
vibe of cultural spaces in the Middle East. In any case, the works in
the current show are considerably more interesting than what might
typically hang on café walls.

"Ashes to Art," as the show is
called, features painting and sculpture by five members of the "Iraqi
Phoenix" group (several of whom are friends of Steve Mumford, the
American artist who went to Iraq with a press pass from Artnet Magazine,
as well as of Steven Vincent, the former art critic and journalist who
was murdered in Basra last year). The "Phoenix" label, like most such
categories, is a construction for the consumption of outsiders, coined
by the present show’s curator, Peter Hastings Falk. Nevertheless, it
does represent a set of coherent esthetic concerns.

The
Phoenix group is characterized by a strange two-sidedness. Their work
clearly resembles late modernist expressionism -- apparently, Catalan
mystic painter Antoni Tàpies was a big influence on an earlier
generation of European-trained Iraqis -- while at the same time making
use of materials that pack an inevitable political charge. [read on...]

Tattered book covers salvaged from the Iraqi Academy of Fine Arts and wax sketches of US bombs blowing up Baghdad are part of an exhibition of Iraqi artists in New York's Soho gallery district.

Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix will be on display at the Pomegranate Gallery from 19 January through 22 February. The exhibitition concentrates on subject matter from the most recent chapter of Iraq's history, beginning with the March 2003 bombing of Baghdad.

Artist Qasim Sabti, who graduated from the academy in 1980, wrote in his statement for the exhibitition: "The morning after that first sleepless night, I went to check on a place most dear to me, the Academy of Fine Arts."

He described entering the academy's library, which had been burned. Sabti turned books he refers to as "survivors" into collages by exposing and reapplying layers of their delicate bindings which are on show in the exhibitition.

Hana Malalla, the only woman among the 10 artists represented in the exhibitition, submitted the painting The Looting of the Museum of Art, which she created on wood that she cut, burned and painted.

Charred elementThe exhibition's curator, Peter Hastings Falk, points out that a charred element exists in nearly all works in the exhibition. "This is the aesthetic of the country," he said. [read on...]

The title of Yussef El Guindi's new play, "Back of the Throat," refers
to an attempt by the lead character, an Arab-American writer named
Khaled, to tell the government agents who show up at his door how to
pronounce the first syllable of his name.

This task, the need to identify and explain oneself, has become a
familiar one since 9/11 to Arab-Americans, who often find themselves
the subject of both curiosity and fear. For playwrights, though, this
twin desire, has turned out to be an opportunity.

"For the
longest time Arab issues or Muslim issues just had not been on the
radar," said Mr. El Guindi, whose play has its New York premiere today
at the Flea Theater. "They were regarded as too complex."

The subject was just "too edgy," he said. Then came 9/11. "Suddenly there were calls for plays," he added.

Mr.
El Guindi is one of a small group of Arab-American playwrights who have
gained a higher profile since the terrorist attacks. Their work, they
say, is partly designed to counter stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims.

That
effort has also helped unite a scattered and diverse group of
immigrants and second- and third-generation Arabs, Muslims and
Christians alike. "Prior to Sept. 11, I felt the Arab community was a
lot like the Mideast itself, made up of insular communities," said
Heather Raffo, a half Iraqi and half American playwright who was raised
as a Catholic. She wrote and acted in "Nine Parts of Desire" about
contemporary Iraqi women. "But since that time it's become an
immediate, all-inclusive, wanting to create together." [read on...]